Victory vid!

Tego! "Metele Salzon!" Dig it!

INTERNET OUT! Tego Calderon wins

Hey all,

My (stolen) Internet is down. Doing this from work.

Tego Calderon wins... victory video up shortly.

I Hate Winter or The Reggaeton Battle: Tego Calderon vs. Calle 13

Hey all,

I feel like sort of a douche for not writing for a month, but I've a) been doing and little writing elsewhere and b) have been super tired and a little depressed thanks to the endless, dark, shitty Canadian winter.

To combat the winter blahs, I've decided to do a summery video battle.

Reggaeton is a seasonal product. Sure, you can hear it any time of year, but it really comes out in full force during the summer months. For me, I can always tell spring is upon us when I can't walk more than two blocks along Dufferin or Landsdowne without getting a blast of Daddy Yankee or Don Omar from an open car window.

For those of you unfamiliar with the genre, reggaeton is a mix of dancehall reggae, hip-hop and Latin music like bomba, salsa and merengue. While early '90s Panamanian MC El General is sort of considered the first reggaeton artist, the music didn't really start blowing up until the Puerto Ricans got a hold of it. They initially called the music Dem Bow, since most of the songs jacked the beat from a Shabba Ranks tune of the same name. Puerto Ricans like Tego Calderon, Daddy Yankee, and Don Omar represent the bulk of the genre's stars, and Puerto Rican-Americans in New York, Florida and New England gave reggaeton a beachhead in North America.

After a decade and a half of Latin Love, reggaeton crossed over into the English market in 2004, when both Don Omar's "Dale Don Dale" and Daddy Yankee's "Gasolina" made a mark on English Top-40 radio. (An aside, I think "Gasolina" may be the most annoying song ever, and it temporarily turned me off the genre as a whole."

THE MAIN EVENT

In the Red Corner, a man who's a sex symbol throughout Latin America, despite the fact he looks like Bubbles from The Wire, TEGO CALDERON!

Tegui Calderon Rosario was born in Santurce, Puerto Rico in 1972. He used to play in a metal band and is a formally trained drummer. He's also credited as being one of the first reggaeton artists to infuse the genre with a heavy dose of East Coast hip-hop. If there's such a thing as a thinking man's reggaeton artist, Tego would be it. While he certainly likes ass as much as the next guy, T also tried to throw a little social consciousness in with the gyrating. He traveled to Africa with Paul Wall and Raekwon to take part in a VH1 doc called Bling'd, which makes the link between hip-hop and blood diamonds. He officially stopped wearing jewelery after the trip.

Here's the video for "Cosa Buena."


THE COMPETITION
In the Blue Corner, from San Juan, Puerto Rico, reggaeton's arty guys, CALLE 13!

Calle 13 consists of three and a half people, MCs and half brothers Residente and Eduardo and multi-instrumentalist Visitante. The half member is Residente and Eduardo's sister Ileana, who provides vocals on some of the tracks.

You know reggaeton has come into its own when groups try and deny being reggaeton artists. Calle 13 go out of their way to say that reggaeton is only part of their rich sound tapestry, and that only some of their songs have the trademark reggaeton digital drumbeats. It's also worth mentioning that Calle 13 are the rich kids of the scene. While most reggaeton artists are straight hood cats, Residente, Eduardo and Ileana, although not raised in the lap of luxury, were brought up by weird boho art types. Their mom, Flor Joglar de Gracia, was part of Puerto Rican revolutionary theatre troupe Teatro de Sesenta.

This is their anthem of Puerto Rican pride (complete with shaking asses) "Atrevate-te-te."




If you don't remember, comment to vote, votes due by Friday, midnight.

Happy 2009, Omnikrom and TTC make me hungry!

And they win!

Here's the video for Omnikrom's "Prends une photo avec moi."

Maybe I am a hipster, just a poorly dressed, uncool one: Cool Kids v. Omnikrom and TTC

What's up, all?

I hope everyone had a nice Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa etc.

So, a few months ago, back when the weather was nice, I was at an event DJed by my good friends Matt Blair and Nemo Burbank.

Nemo started talking about the hipster rap phenomenon, and said something to the effect that, while he hated the whole thing, he couldn't help but like The Cool Kids 'cause they were just so damn catchy. I attempted to mount a defense of Spank Rock, to which Nemo responded with a concise "Spank Rock can go get AIDS." (Or something like that. I definitely know he wanted them to get some sort of horrible, fatal disease. The specifics may be hazy due to time and alcohol.)

Let's back up, here. What is hipster rap? That's a really good question. As far as I can tell, it's hip-hop made by hipsters -- either the garden vareity white ones like Ghislain Poirier and half of Spank Rock or blipsters ("black hipsters") like The Cool Kids and the other half of Spank Rock -- for hipsters. They lyrics are pointedly ungangsta. It usually, although not always, incorporates a lot of late '80s/early '90s throwbacks as far as aethetics, and the beats are often pretty heavy on techno influences.

Again, the key component here seems to be the hipstertude of the performers. More "street credible" acts that have accidentally attracted a large hipster audience -- a la The Clipse and Lil' Wayne -- are not considered hipster rap, even if they have electro beats and rope gold.'

I maintain that I'm not a hipster based on the fact that I'm slightly overweight, poorly dressed, broke and about six-to-eight months behind on every trend. On the other hand, I like Labatt 50, have a blog, and fervently deny my hipsterdom.

Whatever, enough about me.

The Main Event

In the red corner, from Chicago, Illinois and Detroit, Michigan, a group that's nostalgic for the '80s, even though they were both born after 1985, THE COOL KIDS!

The Cool Kids (known individually as Mikey Rocks and Chuck Inglish) may be the poster children for Internet-era music. They met via MySpace, and spent most of two years using that same website to get their music to the public, creating a huge media buzz. They then released a hit EP that was available on iTunes weeks before you could buy a physical copy, and made a load of money licensing songs to ads and video games. Oh, and most of their songs are shorter than three minutes.

They're also pretty divisive. I'm not speaking as a journalist here, I haven't done any studies, but anecdotally speaking, you either really like this group or you don't.

People in the pro-Cool Kids camp say they make likable, danceable old school-flavoured party records that appeal to people who are turned off by both thuggin' crack rap and heavy-handed, message-driven conscious music.

The anti-Cool Kids crowd say they're the Seinfeld of hip-hop, and not in a good way. They're about nothing. At their core, they're two guys waxing nostalgic for a mythical version of the year of their birth. They represent everything that's wrong with modern hipster culture, they're a meaningless collage of pop-culture signposts.

Personally, I like them. Here's the video for "Black Mags."

The Competition

In the blue corner, from Montreal, Quebec and Paris, France, the Francophone hipster rap power team of OMNIKROM AND TTC!

I openly don't know nearly as much about either of these artists as I do about The Cool Kids, and my iffy French makes research a bit of an uphill struggle.

Here's what I know. They have three members (MCs Jeanbart and Linso Gabbo and producer Figure8).

They roll with Montreal-based DJ-and-superproducer Ghislain Poirier.

They have a lot of songs that are either about food or use food as a metaphor -- again, my French is sketchy, I understand the words but can't read them for secondary meaning and I don't get idioms -- and finally, a writer for La Presse dubbed them horrible misogynists when they played the '06 Francofolies de Montreal, and the ensuing controversy got them on Radio-Canada and helped make them minor celebrities among the French-speaking third of the population.

TTC are from France and were making what's now called hipster rap way before the term hipster was resurrected in about 2002. They consist of Tido Berman, Teki Latex, Cuizinier and DJ Orgasmic.

They're also signed to Big Dada, which has got to be one of my favourite record labels of all time.

Most importantly, their first full length album was call Ceci n'est pas une disque. Put that in your non-existant pipe and smoke it.

Here's the video for "Danse la Poutine."

Now, this could just be my sketchy French again, but why are they looking for the poutine place on Rachel St. if they're hanging out with a giant carton of poutine? Couldn't they just eat him?

Comment to vote, votes due by Friday at midnight.

Odelay Ese! Latin Rap Classics of the Early '90s: Kid Frost vs. Mellow Man Ace

If you're wondering about the creative process behind this blog, it goes a little something like this.

Usually, I'll stumble across a video I like on the Internet, decide it's combat worthy and start looking for an opponent. It's not actually that complicated. It's not like there's a ton of thought that goes into it.

This week was no different. I ran across a video I loved as a kid, then looked for a worthy match.

The Main Event

In the blue corner, from Pinar del Rio, Cuba, by way of South Gate, California, the lost member of Cypress Hill, MELLOW MAN ACE!

Mellow Man Ace (aka Ulpiano Reyes) started rapping in the mid '80s. In 1987, he formed a group called DVX with his brother Senen and their friends Louis Freese and Lawrence Muggerud. A year later, Ace would quit the group to go solo. Senen, Freese and Muggerud, better known as Sen Dog, B-Real and DJ Muggs, would re-christen the group Cypress Hill and go on to convince millions of fifteen year-olds to smoke pot.

Ace released his solo debut, Escape from Havana, on Capitol Records in 1989. The album did close to nothing for eight months until, in total defiance of music industry logic, someone decided to release "Mentirosa," a song where close to fifty per cent of the lyrics are in Spanish, as a single.

""Mentirosa" was a tremendous hit, going to number fourteen on the Billboard Hot 100. It would also be Ace's only solo commercial success. (He would have a minor hit with a remake of War'sLowrider" called "Lowrider on the Boulevard" as part of Kid Frost's supergroup The Latin Alliance.) His second solo album, 1992's The Brother with Two Tongues, sold poorly. He was dropped from Capitol shortly afterwards. He wouldn't release another album for eight years.

Here's the video for "Mentirosa." If anyone knows where I can get a hat like the one Ace is wearing in the video, let me know.



The Opposition

In the red corner, from East Los Angeles, California, the Hispanic Causing Panic, KID FROST!

Arturo "Kid Frost" Molina started rapping in 1982 as part of Uncle Jamm's army, the massive electro-hip-hop crew the was the West Coast's equivalent of the Zulu Nation. He chose the stage name Kid Frost as a tribute to the man who was alternately his mentor and his rival, Ice T.

After the breakup of the Army in 1988, Frost started working on his first solo album. Hispanic Causing Panic was released in June of 1990. Panic charted at number 45 on Billboard's Hip-Hop and R & B chart on the strength of the single "La Raza," the clip for which features some of the most awesome cholo fashion in music video history.

In 1991, he formed the Latin Alliance, a Latin Rap supergroup featuring Mellow Man Ace, ALT, Markski and The Lyrical Engineer.

In 1992, he released the concept album East Side Stories. The album flopped and he was dropped by Virgin.

In 1995, he dropped the "Kid" from his name, signed with Eazy-E's Ruthless Records label and released Smile Now, Die Later, which produced the hit single "East Side Rendezvous." He left Ruthless in 1997.

Frost is still making albums. His last album, Blunts and Ballerz, came out in 2007.

He all spawned hip-hop progeny. Frost's son is producer Scoop DeVille, who's made hits for Snoop Dogg and Baby Bash.

Here's the video for "La Raza."



As always, comment to vote, votes are due by Friday at midnight.

Apparently Korea is more "down" than Germany, Sniper beats Sido

Hey all,

I'm busting this thing off real quick-like from the office.

Sniper beat Sido a convincing four votes to two, although the Sido camp made a view solid arguments.

Anyway, here's Sniper's victory video, "Koreans." No really, that's what it's called.

This is how we kick it in ESL class: Sido vs. MC Sniper

It struck me that it'd been a while since I did a post featuring video in other languages, so I decided to remedy that situation. Here it is, all hip-hop, all foreign.

The Battle

In the red corner, from Berlin. Germany, the German demon spawn of Necro, Eminem and MF Doom, SIDO!

German hip-hop got it's start in the mid-1980s when kids in Hamburg and Stuttgart starting aping the American rap they heard on the American Forces Network, the radio station produced by the US Military for forces stationed overseas.

For years, the biggest German hip-hop groups, most notably Die Fantastichen Vier, were all pretty much on some "throw your hands in the air," Fresh Prince-type party rhymes. Deep, heavy subject matter was off the table.

This started to change in the '90s when a group called Advanced Chemistry released a track called "Fremd in eigenem Land" ("Foreign in your own country"), the first German hip-hop song to seriously talk about racism and immigrant bashing in post-unification Germany.

At the turn of the last millennium, a separate, much angrier hip-hop scene started to develop in primarily Turkish housing projects of Berlin. The Berliners weren't interested in directing their rage at the system like the groups of the '90s. They just wanted to fuck shit up.

The leader of the pack is Sido, who isn't just a rapper, he's also the CEO of Aggro-Berlin Records, the label that helped fuel much of the fury.

Here's some fun facts about Sido:

He usually wears a gold skull mask.

He once talked shit about fellow Berlin rapper Azad's mother in a TV interview. He later apologized.

He had the good taste to tell Mike Shinoda that Fort Minor sucks, and that Linkin Park sucks more, live on MTV Germany's version of TRL.

Here's the clip for "Strassenjunge" ("Streetkid") off of 2006's Eine Hand wäscht die andere (One Hand Washes the Other).




The Competition

In the blue corner, from Seoul, South Korea, MC SNIPER!

OK, on the real, my internet research has yielded very little information on MC Sniper. I know he's from Korea, he used to run a hip-hop club in Seoul called The South Side, he's had his songs banned from Korea's commercial airwaves, and his blood type is B. No really, that's on a website.

What's really important is that his fourth album, How Bad Do U Want It?, featured an epic posse cut called "Better Than Yesterday." This song has a beat that sounds like crazy Asian superhero music and guest vocals from a dude named Outsider who holds the world record for most syllables-per-minute in a rap song.

OK, So I'm Taking a Week Off, Nobody Panic

Hey all,

I feel like I got a little fail on me, but shit was hectic at work and I just didn't get a chance to post, so I'm just taking this week as a hiatus. Trust I'll be back at it next week.

In the mean time, here's the video for "Office Boy" by Bonde do Role. If BDR beat CSS back in the Brazilian Buzz Band Battle, this would have been their victory video.

OK, next week, I swear.

Sorry for the Delay

Hey all, may be a little late getting the next post up on account of I have to go to the Borough for Mother's Day.

As a tribute to our Boomer mums, here's the clip for Asha Bhosle's "Dum Maro Dum,"from the 1971 Bollywood flick Hare Krishna Hare Rama. Although it's sung by Bhosle, it's actually the super-hot Zeenat Aman who's shown singing in the scene. Even though my folks aren't Indian, I figure it's sort of appropriate because they could be the wasted white kids in the clip.

Also, I realize this isn't technically a music video, but it's close enough.

Felicitações ao CSS, o Mais Buzziest das Faixas Brazilian do Zumbido

The people voted and, aside from Sqwd's pronounced love of pauses, the results were pretty clear, 3 - 1 for CSS. I don't know what did it; if it was the iPod ad, the ghost puppets in the video, the DFA reference or just how freakishly hot Lovefoxx is, but people had a clear preference here.

Their victory video is the clip for "Music is My Hot Hot Sex," aka "The iPod Touch Song."

Even before the ad, this was one of my favourite CSS songs, in part because Lovefoxx busts out her native tongue at the end of the song. I also love this video, because it encapsulates how hard it must be to make a video with a band who's whole shtick is making music for people with severe ADHD.

Female Fronted Brazilian Buzz Bands: Cansei de Ser Sexy vs. Bonde do Role

OK, so I know I promised Sqwd a special edition of Music Video Violence just for him, to make up for disappointing him so bitterly. That, and because he's a whiny little bitch. My whiny little bitch. I promise that The Sqwd Special Edition will be forthcoming, but first I wanted to do something a little less creepy and a little more tropical.

I'm not very well traveled. I know a lot of people who are, and I hate them. I particularly hate them because they keep telling me that I could be well traveled, too, all I need is a bunch of money and some time off. Unfortunately, I'm massively in debt, poor, lack financial discipline and refuse to take time off work for severe injury and illness, let alone a vacation, so I don't see a whole lot of travel in the near future.

In the medium term, I really want to go to Brazil.

Brazil's a country that's fascinated me for a while. On one hand, it has pretty much everything that's good in the world: fresh produce, incredible wildlife, good barbecue, the world's most exciting soccer, decent basketball, great music and really, really insanely attractive women. Oh, and they speak Portuguese, which is one of the coolest sounding languages in the world. It has almost no hard consonants.

On the other hand, it's also a pretty fucked up country by almost all accounts. It has some of the worst income disparity on Earth and you're more likely to get killed in Rio than any other city on the planet, save Johannesburg. (Strangely, South Africa is also really high on the list of country's that fascinate me. I don't know what this says about me.) Oh, and they're cutting down the rain forest at almost mind blowing speed, and they're also really odd about race.

Apparently I'm not the only one who's really into Brazil, because Brazilian bands are fucking huge right now. I think it may have something to do with both the rich musical heritage and the unreasonably attractive women. Just a thought. Anyway, this week, we're going to put the buzziest of the Brazilian buzz bands and put them head to head.

The Main Event

In the blue corner, with a buzz factor of an iPod ad, from São Paulo, CANSEI de Ser SEXY!

Sometimes a band just gets so cool you want to backlash and stop liking them. I had that urge when CSS became an iPod ad band, but I didn't because a) that's a really douchebag move, and b) they're just too good to not like.

If you believe the band, CSS was pretty much started as a joke. Legend has it a couple of them more or less learned to play their instruments in front of audiences. They got hugely blown up by Brazilian website Trama Virtual, and a writer from The Guardian said they could be the "biggest band ever to come out of South America" before they had even signed with a record label. That sort of talk is usually meaningless hype, particularly when it comes from the British music press, who are notorious for discovering the greatest band in human history every five or six days. While it's still hard to see them eclipsing Sepultura, let alone Spanish-language superstars like Soda Stereo, anyone who's seen CSS live can understand why someone would get so excited about them. They're one of the best live bands I've ever seen. I watched them open for Ladytron two years ago and they pretty much blew the dour Liverpudlians off the stage. In fact, CSS frontwoman Lovefoxx sort of scared the Ladytron crowd.

Lovefoxx is like a tiny, neon-clad, Japanese-Brazilian Tasmanian Devil. She stage dives without irony, she manages to make bad dancing look sexy, she jumps on the monitors and loses her balance and dry-humps her bandmates. She makes Torontonian hipsters dance, and that's no small feat. She also touched my friend Morgan's boob at the Ladytron show. Sadly, she's engaged to one of the guys from The Klaxons, totally breaking my heart.

This is the video for "Let's Make Love and Listen to Death From Above." There's a couple rad things here. One, there's not many bands that would put their ego aside and write a love song to another band. Two, I feel like the ladies (and gentleman) of CSS are giving me a little tour of their hometown in this video. This video takes my urge to visit Brazil and doubles it.



Now for their opponents.

In the red corner, from Curtiba, with a buzz factor of being discovered by Diplo, BONDE do ROLE!

In Brazil, the kids in the hood have developed a music they call funk. It sounds a like the bastard child of Miami Bass and violent hate. I started listening to it when I was in my first year of university after reading an article in Spin about, funk balls, parties that got the kids so wound up they would stab the fuck out of each other in the middle of the dance floor. Apparently Diplo got into it around the same time, but because he's much cooler and more important than me, he set about trying to break the genre in North America, where I just sat in my room, downloaded Furaçao 2000 mixtapes off the Internet and smoked pot.

Discovering Bonde do Role in Curtiba was sort of Diplo's equivalent to discovering Lucy at the Olduvai Gorge. They're kind of the giant ruby in his global dance music crown, right between MIA and Baltimore Club.

For the record, Bonde do Role have about as much hood cred as me. They're a bunch of middle-class art school kids playing hood music, but they know that and they're cool with it. It's just that comparing these guys to legitimately heavy dudes like Juca or Mr. Catra is kind of like comparing MC Paul Barman to M.O.P. Not that there's anything wrong with Paul Barman, in fact, I'm a big MC PB fan. Nor is there anything wrong with Bonde do Role, they are what they are and they own it by doing things like sampling Alice in Chains and the Grease soundtrack, and Bonde do Role DJ Rodrigo Gorky produces some of the best mixtapes I've ever heard.

Bonde do Role almost broke up late last year when MC Marina Ribatski quit the band. Gorky and MC Pedro D'Eyrot decided to replace her in an American Idol-style reality show on MTV Brazil. In the end they picked two new female vocalists. The incredibly un-Brazilian-named Laura Taylor was chosen by the audience, while Ana Bernardino was picked by the band after she took a piece of meat out of her vagina.

This is the video for "Solta o Frango" off their North American full-length debut With Lasers. The name of the song translates as "Release the Chickens," which I sort of knew from eating a lot of Portuguese barbecue. Or at least I knew "frango" meant "chicken."

This video features the now departed Marina Ribatski on the mic. I think she has the same stylist as Lovefoxx. That or all Brazilian girls are taking this retro '80s hipster thing and flying it to Absurdistan. This video is so good it almost makes me want to shit myself. I can't even tell you anything about it or I'll ruin the incredible surprise.


Go do it.

We Have a Winner! Congratulations Noreaga!

OK, apparently you motherfuckers don’t respect the democratic process, since only four of you bothered to vote.

Sadly, we ended this week's polling in a two-two tie. After a tie-breaker (coin flip), Noreaga was crowned this week’s champion. If you have a problem with that, you should have fucking voted.

In celebration of Noreaga’s triumph, we’re going to put up another one of his video’s. This is “Mas Maiz” off of 2006 reggaeton album/orgy of guest artists N.O.R.E. y la Familia … Ya Tú Sabe. To give you an idea of how many guests artists are on this album, this joint alone features Big Mato, Nina Sky, La Negra, Fat Joe, Lumidee, Chingo Bling and Lil’ Rob. With that many guests, it’s a small miracle Noreaga gets on the cut at all.

A few more things about this song:

1) I want to have sex with Lumidee in the worst way.

2) Fat Joe’s Spanish is about as good as my French. His mother must be appalled.

3) Chingo Bling is a fucking genius.

Go get it.